The Three-Sketch Rule
by TolkienGirl
Summary: If you draw someone three times, it means you have a crush. [MJ crushes on Peter. Pre-IW.] [Tagged as Mary Jane, because there's no Michelle Jones tag in this section. This is Homecoming 'verse, if that wasn't obvious.]


Listen, life is never simple. MJ knows this, like she knows that she _will_ punch the next person who thinks Billie Holiday is a man, even though violence is against every policy she holds dear. See? See how nothing's simple, and everything's a tangle of contradictions, and Peter Parker, friendly neighborhood slice of whitebread, is somehow always on her mind?

.

(Parker. She calls him Parker at first.)

Parker has a boring face that used to be kind of cute in a little kid way and then was just boring. Boring boring boring. MJ repeats this as needed, until need isn't enough and he's cute, dammit. Cute in a dangerous, teenage-boy way, if you were wondering.

His eyes are more hazel than she'd expected.

.

The rule is: if you draw someone three times, it means you have a crush.

But what does it mean to draw someone?

The fifth time she doodles Parker's profile in the margin of her notebook, she decides that only a real, honest-to-God portrait counts a as "drawing." Everything else is in the limbo of unanswerable questions.

Surely, this is sufficient explanation. The conversation is only with herself.

.

His hands are a boy's hands, stubby nails, weird scars. Half of the scars are probably from misadventures with Lego. The other half—

But MJ is a realist. She has her suspicions, though she won't voice them yet.

(Not even to herself.)

The point is, Peter's hands are interesting to draw. She finds that charcoal suits them best, gives them a grace that—well, that they already have, but charcoal's buttery smudges soften the edges. The problem with drawing hands is that they become so known, so familiar, that she can't help imagining what his fingers would be like if they slipped through hers.

 _Ahem_.

It's not a portrait. It doesn't count.

.

Drawing Peter's— _oh_ , _shit_ , she's thinking of him as _Peter_ now—shoulders is a bit more risky. Still, she justifies it because she always sits behind him in class, and yes, objectively, there is value in knowing the history of Stamp Act, but MJ has had enough of white men arguing over taxation. She'd much rather know what kind of Black culture was developing in the late 1700s, still decades away from emancipation. Anything that is a quick wiki away, and probably the subject of a Chernow book, is…not really worth her time.

And thus, here she is, drawing Peter's shoulders, which are annoyingly developed for a teenage boy's. She's used to the concave biceps and poky shoulder blades that her classmates do their best to accentuate anyway. She's _not_ used to the lean, solid muscle that actually _ripples_ whenever he raises his hand, which is often.

She does his shoulders in mechanical pencil, because that makes it nothing at all, not even a real sketch.

.

Peter's eyes call out for acrylics, and he's not in her art class—barely anybody is. Therefore, MJ decides it's safe to do a study of the whorls of green and amber, the curling lashes. It is one of the great injustices of the gender binary, that guys have longer eyelashes, as a rule, than girls.

The fact that it's biology is not welcome in MJ's internal conversation. Biology is stirring up enough shit these days.

.

The first portrait she draws of Peter doesn't count, because it's the goofy one she did in detention, poking fun at his melancholy (with the best intentions, of course). That was before she admitted that she went by MJ, before Liz left and MJ felt the whole world tilting on its axis, opening doors she hadn't even knocked at.

Her grand-dad started the MJ nickname. He said Michelle sounded too fragile, and she was always one-thousand percent steel.

She doesn't feel like steel when she looks at Peter, at the way his hair curls softly at the nape of his neck when it needs to be cut. She doesn't feel like steel most of the time, actually, but that's why she—and everyone else—wears armor.

.

"Hey, MJ." His voice isn't breaking anymore. It's steadier, now, and so are his eyes. MJ clutches her sketchpad in her hands until her knuckles whiten.

"Hey, Peter."

He grins. It's wide-open, like her heartbeat wants to be. She'll draw him later, in pen-and-ink. A proper portrait. She still has one left, doesn't she? Or maybe she's counting wrong—maybe it _is_ too late.

"What do you want, Peter?" She means to say it with steel, but the armor slips so fast she can almost hear the clatter.

He waggles a finger in the direction of her pad. "You ever gonna let me see your work?"

There's a bruise blossoming under the edge of his t-shirt, just above his hip. She caught a glimpse of it in gym, which—tells you enough, probably.

 _I'll show you mine if you show me yours._ It's time to stop pretending that Peter Parker isn't better drawn in red and blue and heroism.

"We all have our secrets," is what MJ comes up with, and she holds her drawings close against her heart.


End file.
